The Vostok Ice Core

There is an interesting article on the analysis of ice core data published in nature (see https://www.nature.com/articles/20859) and titled “Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica.” The core extends through 3,633 meters and was stopped at 120 meters above a deep subglacial lake located beneath the station. The locations are shown in the figure below from (By NASA/User:Muriel Gottrop/User:Ningyou - NASA, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27644)

 

 

Satellite radar imagery

Satellite radar data reveals an extensive subglacial aquatic system beneath the ice sheet (image below). The Vostok Lake is about the size of Lake Ontario. The image from Wikipedia Commons can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Subglacial_lakes#/media/File:Antarctic_Lakes_-_Sub-glacial_aquatic_system.jpg

 

Vostok Lake in perspective

The schematic diagram below shows the relationship of the ice sheet to the underlying lake in a bedrock valley (see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Vostok_drill_2011.jpg – Source National Science Foundation).



 

 

The ice core penetrates nearly 3500 meters of ice and provides an over than 400,000 year record of CO₂, CH₄, temperature variations from deuterium (hydrogen atom with a neutron), precipitation rate and much more.